Building an Encyclopedia, With or Without Scholars

By BROCK READ

Like many of the Internet's cleverest ideas, Wikipedia began as
an experiment. The site, founded in 2001 by Jimmy Wales, a former
options trader, and Larry Sanger, a graduate student in philosophy,
was born out of a similar collaborative effort created for
scholars.

Wikipedia began as an offshoot of Nupedia, an online
encyclopedia started by the two partners in 2000. They planned to
ask academics to submit articles that would be peer-reviewed and
posted free online. The idea seemed